In the News

I was pretty amazed by 1 district in Alabama that stretches 100 miles or so from the famed "Black Belt" up into Birmingham. Apparently North Carolina is just as creative. But this article also brings up the "majority vs. influence" quandary - electing 1 rep is better than not quite electing either of 2, but this difference changes according to party preference, migration of populations, et al., not just gerrymandering. However, at the moment, gerrymandering and other obstruction seems to be high GOP strategy, so it's worth revisiting in terms of that context in terms of what would the black electorate like.

It's science - you'd think there'd be some capacity for uncertainty. Even with gravity we just measured the first gravity waves for the first time, a few months back. We just discovered the assortment of planets in our solar system is *very bizarrely* ordered (though balanced, just more peculiarly than we thought). How quickly can a new science move to completely untouchable doctrine? The point of the guy's work wasn't even to deny manmade global warming - he's in - it was to assess accuracy of predictions and such. As Trump would say, "Not good enough!"

"The Americans loved our stories and we make money from them," he boasts, making sure I see the designer watch he's fiddling with. "Who cares if they are true or false? Goran...is one of scores, or probably hundreds of Macedonian teenagers...in the small city of Veles which churned out fake pro-Trump news during the US election campaign." If Trump can scam them, why not Macedonians?

I mean, why else would he get the position aside from growing up in the inner city until he was 18 (though I hear the pharoah may have been black, so perhaps that explains it. Or perhaps big cities are like one big brain with people like cells....

Trump is effectively pitting the interests of a relatively small group of people, those who work in factories, against hundreds of millions of consumers. Seven years ago, the Obama administration accused China of unfairly subsidizing tires. It imposed tariffs reaching 35 percent. A subsequent analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the effect: Some 1,200 American tire-making jobs were preserved, but American consumers paid $1.1 billion extra for tires. That prompted households to cut spending at retailers, resulting in more than 2,500 net jobs lost.

Americans vote their pocketbook. Memorize, live by this lesson. "I Feel Your (monetary) Pain". Never ever ever forget, or we'll be back here again.

From WaPo:

For all her white papers and all her slogans on the economy, Hillary Clinton never offered a tangible vision of what millions of new, more dignified jobs would look like; how struggling workers would find them; and what she would do, as president, to make sure those jobs sprouted in their back yards.

Sometimes less is more. Trump's message was "I'll do anything outrageous to make a buck".

Apparently I've written "fake news" on behalf of Russia without ever receiving a dime from Russia or realizing what I was doing. It took the intrepid reporting of the Washington Post to alert me to what I have been engaged in. My "fake news" has been published in at least 18 Russian propaganda outlets included on the Washington Post-endorsed Enemies List.

Permit me to sit out the Great Media Apology Tour of 2016. Since election night, we have been fed a steady stream of mea culpas for the press’s failure to see it all coming, and especially for negligently ignoring the fear, anxiety and despair in the Rust Belt, the oil patch and rural America. Benighted Trump voters were singing the Red America Blues while we elites were tuned to Live from the Met or some such.

The popular notion of “city” and “country,” one progressive and “vibrant,” the other regressive and dying, misses the basic geographic point: the largest metropolitan constituency in the country, far larger than the celebrated, and deeply class-divided core cities, is the increasingly diverse suburbs. Trump won suburbia by a significant five percentage point margin nationally, improving on Romney’s two-point edge, and by more outside the coastal regions.

For Doc Cleveland or whoever else needs to plot the intrigues in these dire times. Who's Donald, who's Duncan, who's MacBeth, and most important, who's Lady MacBeth, since we know there's a woman's cunning behind all this mischief.

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In the News

I have no idea or particular opinion about whether Garrison Keillor is guilty of anything, though it's always struck me as odd. But this somewhat but not quite illuminating article gums up the works a bit when taken as a part of a whole. The whole, of course, being accusations flying hither and yon with little if any explanation - even when they could stand some.

(THREAD) Yulya Alferova—ex-wife of Russian oligarch Artem Klyushin and a member of Trump's entourage in Moscow in 2013—is yet another witness who confirms, albeit inadvertently, Trump lied about what happened at the Ritz Moscow. The list of such witnesses is now very, very long. pic.twitter.com/BViILTZP67

On the hamster wheel of continual work, production and consumption, and Hebert Marcuse's.dreams.

[....] Marcuse did not live to see the 1980s, however [....] But his ideas lived on. In a 2004 essay for Harper’s magazine, for example, novelist and essayist Mark Slouka took to task the U.S. obsession with work [....]

One woman’s account of clandestine meetings, financial transactions, and legal pacts designed to hide an extramarital affair.....American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story ...David Pecker, AMI CEO, describes the President as “a personal friend... he never printed a word about Trump without his approval.”

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Was Trump diminishing the significance of the word treason, projecting onto the opposition (as he so often does) his own transgressions, by accusing Democrats of treason for not applauding him at the SOU?

Talking heads don't appear to have had much time to look at the details yet. Reporters are waiting on the formal announcement from Rod Rosenstein of the indictments. It is clear that they are directly related to Putin, not clear yet whether to the Trump administration.

A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment Friday against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities accused of violating US laws to interfere with US elections and political processes [....]

[....] in a blow to President Donald Trump, the GOP plan to enshrine his four-part immigration framework came the furthest of any proposal from reaching the 60-vote margin needed for passage, failing by 39-60. A competing bipartisan agreement got rejected, 54-45, after a furious White House campaign to defeat it, including a Thursday veto threat.

WASHINGTON — Steve Bannon, who served as President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller over multiple days this week, NBC News has learned from two sources familiar with the proceedings.

When a transgender woman told doctors at a hospital in New York that she wanted to breast-feed her pregnant partner’s baby, they put her on a regimen of drugs that included an anti-nausea medication licensed in Britain and Canada but banned in the United States.

Within a month, according to the journal Transgender Health, the woman, 30, who was born male, was producing droplets of milk. Within three months — two weeks before the baby’s due date — she had increased her production to eight ounces of milk a day [....]

President Trump endorsed a 25-cent gas tax hike to pay for infrastructure at a White House meeting this morning with senior administration officials and members of Congress from both parties, according to two sources with direct knowledge. Trump also said he was open to other ways to pay for infrastructure, according to a source with direct knowledge.